Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!cornell!uw-beaver!teknowledge-vaxc!sri-unix!quintus!ok
From: ok@quintus.uucp (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Algol-68 down for the count (was: Why have FORTRAN 8x at all?)
Message-ID: <720@quintus.UUCP>
Date: 22 Nov 88 05:41:49 GMT
References: <388@ubbpc.UUCP> <16187@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <599@quintus.UUCP> <591@tuck.nott-cs.UUCP> <404@ubbpc.UUCP>
Sender: news@quintus.UUCP
Reply-To: ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Organization: Quintus Computer Systems, Inc.
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In article <404@ubbpc.UUCP> wgh@ubbpc.UUCP (William G. Hutchison) writes:
> Andy, I now know of 2 (two) institutions that ever tried to use Algol-68 at
>all seriously, yours, and Math. Centrum in Amsterdam.

How about Cambridge, where the Algol-68C compiler came from (the one I
used to use)?  How about RRE?  How about the use of Algol 68 on one of
the CMU parallel machines?

What, exactly, were the flaws in the language _design_?  (I will agree
that formats were rather too complicated -- having had Algol 60 
slammed for not having I/O built in the '68 team tried to out-Fortran
Fortran.  And today C is popular, oh the shame of it.)  I contend that

	Algol 68 was a simple language with a complicated _description_
	which frightened a lot of people.

	Pascal was a hideously complex language (special cases and
	special caveats all over the place, UGH) with a deceptively
	simple _description_ which suckered a lot of people.

Whenever I got the Algol 68C compiler to accept a program, it did
exactly what I thought it would (modulo my mistakes).  But not only
was it harder to express even the simplest thing in Pascal (matrix
multiplication, for example), for many years every Pascal compiler
located a different _large_ area of uncertainty about what Pascal was
supposed to mean.  First it got to the point where I stopped using FOR
statements, because I couldn't find two Pascal compilers that did the
same thing with them, and then I gave up trying to port Pascal programs
entirely and rewrote them in C.

-- 
Subjects considered Mexico to be more similar to the United States
than the United States is to Mexico  -- George Lakoff.